The invention relates to the simulation of a set of objects in interaction.
The simulation of objects in interaction is a huge field which extends from the simulation of a multitude of more or less complex mechanical bodies to the simulation of the behaviour of molecules, such as proteins, for example.
The first approaches developed had the aim of assembling objects, i.e. grouping them together in order to define global behaviour. This type of approach is useful because of its relatively low computation costs.
However, the reduction in the computation costs is achieved to the detriment of the realism of the simulation inasmuch as numerous aspects relating to the correlations between the grouped objects are deliberately ignored or reduced to their simplest expression.
Other approaches have involved looking at objects in interaction as articulated bodies. An articulated body is generally made up of two bodies joined together by a joint. The two bodies may themselves be articulated bodies and so on. This approach has made it possible to produce faithful models of the mechanical behaviour of sets of objects of this kind while retaining a high performance level.
The term “mechanical” behaviour is used because the objects interact essentially by means of the articulation or joint that connects them. Thus, it is necessary only to model the joints in order to model the set of objects.
When the interactions between the objects become more complex, these approaches become ineffective quite quickly, as the calculation requirements/costs associated with them become prohibitive.